Episode 343 - Amy-Jill Levine (re-release!)

[00:00:10] Speaker A: Welcome to that Makes Total Sense, a podcast dedicated to exploring God's generosity and justice. I'm Alexis Busetti, a Christian, aiming to ask good questions and encouraging you to do the same. Every one of us is wired by God to live out generosity and justice, but the how sometimes eludes us. That makes Total Sense is a way for us to get together, posture ourselves as learners, and challenge one another to practice generosity and justice in a tangible way every day. Okay, I am. I'm trying not to fangirl, so I'm just going to take a deep breath and relax. My guest today is Dr. Amy Jill Levine, Scholar professor at Vanderbilt University, and she's written. I mean, you've written so much, AJ but your most recent book is Jesus for Everyone, not just Christians. And I just finished it this week and thought it was incredible. So thank you for the book. Thanks for showing that. I thought it was great. I think we didn't chat about this pre record, but part of I'll, we'll get into it maybe a little bit, but part of my context is I graduated earlier this year with an MDIV from Fuller Seminary, which is an evangelical seminary in California, and then just started my PhD studies this week. So I was really thrilled to read all of this stuff about Jesus and also to see kind of what lined up with what I had studied and what was a different perspective than what I had studied. [00:01:54] Speaker B: So. [00:01:54] Speaker A: So I'm hoping that we'll see some of that today, too, for the listeners. But first, before we get started, I want to see if you can tell us and the listener what would be important for us to know about you. You're a Jewish New Testament scholar, and for some folks that may feel like they may say what, I don't understand that. So can you give us just a little bit of context for who you are and where you're coming from? [00:02:22] Speaker B: Right. I'm not a Messianic Jew. I'm just like a juju. I go to an Orthodox synagogue, but I'm Orthodox in practice. I find working in New Testament gives me Jewish history, and it's Jewish history that the synagogue did not preserve. So we're pretty good up until the Maccabees, which is in the second century. That's the B.C. that's B.C.E. that's the holiday of Hanukkah. And then like magic, we're over into the Mishnah, which is early third century, the two hundreds Common era. So if I want to know something about Jewish life in the first century, the New Testament, along with Josephus and Father Bilo and archeology and whatnot. The New Testament's just a super source. If I want to know about Jewish women in Galilee, the New Testament is my best source. If I want to know about some of the debates that Jews are having, well, I can use the Dead Sea Scrolls and I can use Josephus. What you get in the New Testament is, it looks like stuff on the ground. This is stuff that folks were worried about, like, do you wash your hands before you eat? Huge question. And there's a reason for that. What's the view on divorce? Can you get divorced for any reason, or can you only get divorced in cases of adultery? And if so, how do you prove it? So the New Testament is Jewish history more. And some Christians may be able to relate to this. I. I find in studying Jesus that he makes me a better person. He helps me determine what's important and, and what's kind of peripheral. What stoics would call adafra, like extra stuff. He helps me focus. He sometimes indicts me for reminding me that there are certain things that I should be doing that I haven't done or certain things that I did that I probably ought to regret and then attempt to make amends. So I look at him as just a really, really smart Jewish teacher. When I first started working on the book, the editor, who was no longer with Harper, wanted to call it Jesus for Atheists. So I wrote a book called Jesus for Atheists. And then he decided he didn't like it, which was just as well, because I didn't like it either. I kept thinking, this is not just for people who don't believe in God. This is people who believe that Jesus is God. Or Jews who might believe in God but don't believe in Jesus or Muslims or anybody. Because I find the Gospel stories, so stories told by Jesus like parables or stories told about Jesus, like controversy, narratives recounted in the Gospels. I find that those stories actually are helpful for everybody so that one does not need to believe in God or that Jesus is God in order to get a striking ethical message out of the Jesus tradition. [00:04:47] Speaker A: Yeah, thank you so much. I actually really loved that you ended the book in kind of that way. I'm paraphrasing, although I might be able to find it, but something to the effect of, oh, yeah, we may never get to love of enemy. I'm not there yet, and the love of enemy is not on my bucket list. But human decency, that's attainable. The Bible helps us get there. The Jesus tradition helps us focus and that felt really meaningful to me along with everything that you just said. Because again, my lens is coming at Jesus through a Christian perspective. Now there are Christianities obviously, so through a specific, particular Christian lens and trying to learn more about other Christianities and their lenses through which they view Jesus. But this book was helpful in, in a lot of ways, but one of them being how can we look at a historical Jesus, how you just said some of these things, these debates, these things that are happening, what were they really like in that historical context? It's funny, a pastor of mine, when I was, he was mentoring me and I was asking him about feedback on my preaching and he said, one of the things he said to me was, you know, I don't think not everyone likes to live in the first century as much as you do. And I just thought, oh no, I love to live in the first century. So we can live in the first century together a little bit today. But I'm also interested in bringing it to the 21st century because part of what this book does is you go through chapters of social issues, what was happening then, first century Jesus world, what's happening now. And I'd like for you to maybe give a little bit of perspective on how this first century Jesus conversations can help us as we see similar, similar things that are happening now, how we can extrapolate and apply those teachings, the, the culture to what we're experiencing now. [00:07:05] Speaker B: So I, I don't think in, in the preaching moment we ought to be playing first century Bible land. And I don't want Christians doing that either. And so this is not helpful. Jesus doesn't live in a participatory democracy where he's got to deal with the Internet and gluten intolerant people. But I do think the history is helpful for a couple of reasons. First of all, if we get the history wrong, we're going to get Jesus wrong. And what very often happens in Christian preaching, and this is across the Christian spectrum, is if the pastor or the priest can't get Jesus to say what that person wants Jesus to say, what typically happens is the pastor or priest constructs a very, very negative view of first century Judaism over against which Jesus becomes the social justice warrior. So if we have a problem with sexism or misogyny, then 1st century Judaism makes the Taliban look progressive and Jesus invents feminism in the pantsuit. Or if we have a problem with health care, then Jews equated illness with sin and therefore tossed sick people out on the street. And Jesus channels Florence Nightingale. I mean all these horrible stereotypes of 1st century Judaism that are designed to make Jesus look good. And the sad thing here is that I think Jesus looks just fabulous. But I don't have to construct a negative 1st century Judaism in order to get him there. I can see how he fits within that context. He doesn't have to be unique in all cases in order to be profound. So I'm trying to do away with some of this incipient anti Semitism that keeps creeping into Christian preaching and teaching and then either creates or reinforces anti Semitism in the minds of people in the classroom or people in pew. The other thing is that the more we know about that first century history, the more we can understand what the issues were and whether those issues come to us today. How do we deal with a government that we might about which we may not approve, whether it's the government of Rome or the government of the United States? I mean, if Christians are going to pray your kingdom come, it's pretty clear that the one that they've got is not the one that they want. Otherwise the prayer is sort of silly. How do we relate in terms of family values when we have all sorts of different family values and concerns today? And here I'm particularly concerned about people who, because of gender or sexuality, have been booted out of their families and booted out of their church. And then they toss the Bible alongside everything else to say to these people who have been hurt by certain particular forms of Christian theology or Christian practice. You know, there's stuff in here for you too, depending upon how imaginatively you read. And we can use the hermeneutics of imagination to be able to allow us to find people who have never found themselves in the scriptures. Say, ah, here I am, or here's a place where I can relate, or here's a place where I'm not looked at as somehow peculiar or weird or let alone an abomination, but here's a place where I can find myself to be a child of God. [00:09:58] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. That was early in my notes to bring up. I mentioned to you prerecord that my husband got a hold of this book before me and I was asking him how he was enjoying it and he said that that was the statement. He said was, I love how she's bringing out that you don't have to make Judaism look bad in order to make Jesus look good. [00:10:22] Speaker B: Which should be obvious. [00:10:23] Speaker A: It should be obvious. But I agree with you that it's not. And it's across Christian spectrums. And it does all of the things that you say, promotes anti Semitism even today. And hardly, probably hardly a week goes by, unfortunately, in pulpits across the United States where something like this isn't being preached from some Christian pulpit somewhere. And so I just want to say stop it. But this book is a good, It's a good backup for that. Right? Like, stop it. And here's why. This isn't, this isn't true. And it's also not necessary, as you, as you point out, as I say, that I kind of want to jump in to one of the most, in my opinion, one of the most complex places that you go in the book, and that is your chapter on enslavement. I say that because, as you have articulated, Jesus was a good Jewish teacher. And we don't have to make Judaism look bad in order to make Jesus look good. And when we look deeply at enslavement in Jesus in the Gospels but also in the New Testament, this leaves something to be desired for the Christian, for the Christian who is wanting to make Jesus a social justice warrior, this topic leaves something to be desired. I happened to take a, an entire course on slavery in the New Testament, and I. This was one of the places where what you wrote matched up really well and aligned really well with what I had learned in that course. But still, what I came away with was. And you, you allude to this a lot in the book is kind of more questions than answers with, with these texts. So I'm wondering if you could help us dive into that. The reason I bring it up is because earlier we were talking about how can we, how can we kind of help translate some of the first century things into issues that we're experiencing now, into the treatment of people now? And this is one of those places where I'm like, it's not as clear as we would want it to be, but still, how can we meet Jesus as who he was and where he was in his historical context and also utilize those teachings that we get from him in our current context? [00:12:53] Speaker B: Right. It's. It is a very complex question and few people have actually looked at. I'm delighted to hear that you had a course specifically on slavery. It's like having a course specifically on incarceration in the Bible. I mean, these things that people feel uncomfortable talking about or sometimes. Well, that's not important. Back when I was in graduate school, why would you talk about women? That's not an important subject. Or poor people or economics. Jesus does not condemn slavery. In fact, he commends it. On the other hand, the only people who identify themselves as enslaved to God in the Bible, and this goes back to what you would call the Old Testament, happen to be free people, you know, so what happens if you're actually enslaved to somebody else? So for people who say, well, he could not have condemned slavery because, I mean, you simply couldn't do that in the first century, well, if he can, if he can commend being a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven and telling people they ought to hate their wives, well, you could say slavery is not such a good idea. The Essenes didn't like slavery. The therapeutics, this group that the Jewish philosopher Philo talks about, didn't like slavery. I mean, not everybody agreed with Aristotle that it was natural. But what we can do when Jesus tells parables about slavery or when he encourages his followers to be enslave to all to think about what it might mean theologically for some people, this is really helpful because it helps decenter them, right? I'm. I'm not the center of the world. My only master, which is a terrible image for God, by the way. God a slave master. But my only master is God. The only person who can control me is God. The only person who has a say over what I do, how I act, and even how I think is God. And that can be remarkably freeing. But for others, particularly those who are conscious of the legacy of slavery, whose own lives have been touched by the legacy of slavery, which in the United States is pretty much everybody, these metaphors may not be helpful. So what we can do when they come around, if people are on a lectionary or if they're reading through one of the gospels and they come up with the slavery stuff, is to use those texts as an opportunity to talk about how horrible slavery was, how extraordinary. The metaphor of you should make yourself enslaved to all, which is kind of like saying, give up your life for your friends. How extraordinary that was. And what we do with the legacy and what we do with the language, recognizing that not everybody will come out in the same place. And that's good, because the Bible, I don't think, is a one size fits all document. It's an anthology to begin with. And moreover, we approach it from our own subject position, our own social location. And what a text means to me might be very different than what it means to you. But because we both value the text, we have an opportunity of being in conversation. And that actually helps us know each other better. It helps us go more deeply into the Text because our neighbor sees things that we don't. And in that combination of conversation, I mean, we might not get to the truth, capital T, but I think we get a little bit closer. That's not a bad thing. [00:15:50] Speaker A: No, I, no, I agree. And I just, I kind of want to pause there for a second and just like, say this again. Like, Jesus didn't condemn slavery like this. This is something that for, you know, if you haven't looked at it to, to write a chapter on it in a book or you haven't sat with that for 10 weeks, you know, in a seminary course, this is a jarring statement. But I don't think that we have to be dismayed by that because I think part of what you bring out over and over again is I think in, in Jesus being a good Jewish teacher is he was very familiar with the human condition, interested in particularities and, and nuance and, and just kind of oozed compassion. And I think these things were evident in, in how he spoke. But at the same time, he didn't get to everything. And we can't just excuse those things that we see with him as a historical figure. That's tough. I just want to name that. That's tough for Christians. [00:17:01] Speaker B: I mean, Jesus didn't do a lot of things that I wish he had done right. You know, something on global warming might have been helpful. Something on pollution of the oceans might have been good. He's, you know, he's just dumping the pigs in the sea, which isn't great for anybody. I, I wish he had been more proactive on women's roles. You know, a point, six of the 12 to be women, that would have been good. So he doesn't do everything, but if he did, from a Christian perspective, that would be putting the Holy Spirit out of business. There'd be nothing more to teach and there'd be nothing more to learn. And revelation would have stopped at the close of the New Testament, which also kind of puts God out of business because it said, you know, God has nothing more to say. And that strikes me as limiting God to at best of first century context, putting the Spirit out of business and not allowing Christians to use their brains over time. And brains are something that we have been endowed with. We ought to use them. So history should not be scary to the Christian. History should be like, oh, wow, here's more stuff I can know. And it seems to me if somebody wants to claim to love Jesus, which most Christians do, I would think one would want to know more about, like where he lived and when he lived and the people with whom he interacted and what life was like at the time. You were talking about your husband before. So, you know, when you partner off, you know, well, you know, where did you grow up and what did you like to do as a kid and what was life like at the time? Well, if you do that with a spouse, surely you would do it with somebody you claim to love, who's divine, but he's also fully human. [00:18:29] Speaker A: Yeah, that's good. I'm going to let you keep preaching and I'm going to ask you another question. She talked about women a few times. And this is. I won't get on my soapbox about this, but you feature the stories of so many women that Jesus interacted with in the book. And I almost want to just say, pick one. And I wish we could get to all of them, but I want to. Okay, there's three. Maybe I'll just say choose your own adventure. My first choice was the woman at the well in John 4 and how you address her. She's one of my favorite characters in all of the gospels. And I think she has gotten the worst rap of, of most of the women in all of the gospels. But then there's also I, I went to a college ministry and a Pentecostal college ministry. And so they, they. The woman who bled for 12 years is known as the woman with the issue of blood in that circle. And then the Syrophoenician woman who. I just have read so many scholars on the Syrophoenician woman, particularly because of Jesus response right to her. This is, this is something that makes many Christians feel very uncomfortable in his response to her. So maybe we'll hit him during this conversation. But for now, choose your own adventure. AJ which, which woman can we talk about in her interaction with Jesus and what that says about, about who Jesus was? [00:19:59] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh. Because I like them all. [00:20:00] Speaker A: I know, right? [00:20:01] Speaker B: I think the one that's the most fun is the first one you started with, with John 4, which is the Samaritan woman at the Wells. Love her what John does. And John sets us up already in the prologue to the Gospel, which, which alludes to the creation narrative in Genesis is John. John goes back to perspectives or stories in what the Christians would call the Old Testament and then kind of explodes the convention. So when you have meeting a man, meeting a woman at a well, well, that's where Abraham's servant met Rebecca, and it's where Jacob met Rachel, and it's where Moses met Zipporah so you already know that going to meet a woman at will, the convention is already set. They're going to talk about marriage, which in fact they do. And even before that. And this is what most Christians miss. And a number of Christians I found, get very nervous when I say this. And, and my intent is not to make Christians nervous. I was like, I don't, I don't want to make Christians nervous and I don't want to make Christians guilty. I want to make Christians more engaged with this stuff. Is when she says to him, well, you know, you don't have a bucket and the well is really deep. And he says to her, I have fountains of living water flowing up. So if you know Proverbs and if you know the song of Solomon and if you've ever flirted with anybody, it's very, very clear that they're flirting. And since we know that background of meeting your wife at a well, that it's, it's doubly flirting. So if we know the convention, then she's going to turn out to be a Jewish virgin and they'll go off and get married. And she is so. Not that. So we have this very human Jesus engaging with this one. So what happens? The commentators come in and say, oh, well, because she's been married five times and she's currently cohabitating with somebody who's not her husband. She's a five time loser. She's the town slut. She's a woman of ill repute. And look at how fabulous Jesus is because he speaks to this fallen woman. And that's all in the mind of the interpreter they're bringing in the. She's a whatever, a five time loser. When she goes to her town and she says, hey, I think I just met this guy who might be the Messiah. If they thought she was the town slut, they would have said, lady, you know, we have no concern about what you say. You clearly have no taste. You're clearly a fallen woman. Right? They go, oh, maybe we ought to go see too. Which suggests that she's got some social credibility in the town. And what she winds up doing is instead of becoming the bride, she becomes the matchmaker. And she's the one who facilitates the people from the Samaritan village of Sichar coming up to see Jesus. They invite him in, he stays for a couple of that looks like a wedding celebration. And we've already got weddings on the mind anyway because two chapters earlier was the wedding at Cana. So John set us up for this flirtation that, that then turns into something even more wonderful. And in case we miss that, because John loves to play on literary conventions, this is why doing history is so much fun, because it makes the gospel so much more interesting. In John 20, when Jesus meets Mary Magdalene in the garden, I think, oh, a man and a woman in a garden. Well, I saw that before. Like go back to Genesis 2 and she, she, she sees him in the distance and she mistakes him for, for the gardener. So it's a case of mistaken identity. And she, because she thinks Jesus is dead, so she's not quite sure what's happening. And then he calls her by name and she says, my rabbi, my teacher Rabuni. And. And they reunite. So that's the convention of the Hellenistic romance. It's like Romeo and Juliet, only good. So all that stuff that Shakespeare cribbed and what happens in the Hellenistic romance, you have lovers who are separated, one thinks the other one's dead, one goes to the tomb of the dead one who really isn't dead. And there's a case of mistaken identity. And everybody knows the plot line. And then John again explodes it. You think they're going to get married? No. Stop clinging to me, says Jesus to Mary, you know, but go tell the guys that I, you know, I have to go to my father and to your father and to my God and to your God. So she becomes the apostle to the apostles, not quite a bride, but facilitating a different type of relationship. How fabulous is that? We don't need to negativize her. And when Jesus starts teasing her at the well, she gives as good as she gets. Hey, I see you're a prophet. You know, what do you think? Where ought we to worship? That's a really good question. And by the way, just to finish this up, Jesus does not sacrifice the particulars of his own religion on the altar of interface sensitivity. So he could have said, you Samaritans, you're doing just fine. The people worshiping on Mount Zion, they're doing just fine. And he says to her, actually lady, on this one the Jews got it right, but they'll come a time when we can all worship in spiritual. So he doesn't say, you're okay and you're okay and you're okay is if he's taking religion or faith or belief or theology and coming to some sort of lowest common denominator. And I think that's really helpful because it shows us that we can be an inter religious conversation or intercultural conversation without having to sacrifice who we are and certain Issues we can negotiate and certain theological concerns are non negotiable. But that doesn't keep us from being in relationship. I think that's a fabulous lesson. [00:24:57] Speaker A: No, I, I, I agree with you. I, I want to go a little bit more in this story. I had a professor in seminary once. I was struggling with a paper and I said, I don't, I don't want to write about this because I've just recently had a negative experience and I'm, you know, I'm afraid that'll come out in this. And I don't want to just my paper just to be like, no, no, no, no, no. And he said, you're right because yes, yes, yes, yes, yes is more interesting than no. And, and I think he's right. He's the same professor who used to say, I can give you a whole bunch of stipulations for what I want, but I'm just going to tell you what my professor at Princeton told me, which is don't bore me. [00:25:34] Speaker B: So now that's extremely good advice. [00:25:37] Speaker A: I try to keep that in mind. But I want to, I bring that up to go on the, the negative part because John 4, you brought out the, the negative about who she is. But again, I want to talk about this. You don't have to make Judaism look bad in order to make Jesus look good. Two other places that this shows up in John 4 that you talk about are marriage, Jewish marriage in the first century, but also, also ethnicity, this enmity that is preached often between Jews and Samaritans during that time. And so I'm wondering if you could just bring to light some of those places where I think specifically Christians, when preaching this text, have brought those two things and made Judaism look bad in order to try and make Jesus look good. Specifically, you know, she's been married this many times because. Right. These were the things that could happen in Jewish marriages. But also Jesus was some kind of, you know, there was so much going on between the Samaritans. Right. So much hate and then, and then him being there. So do you mind talking about those two things a little? [00:26:46] Speaker B: Well, first of all, she's not Jewish. She's Samaritan. And Samaritans and Jews are very close. I mean, they have more or less the same Pentateuch that Genesis through Deuteronomy, but they interpret it differently. So whereas Jews would say the place that God chose is Mount Zion, the Samaritans would say it would be Mount Gerizim in Samaria. And that's why she turns around from Sichon basically points to Mount Gerizim and say, we worship on this mountain and you all worship in the south on Mount Zion. There is some enmity, except when there isn't. You know, when they needed to unite against the Romans, they're best friends. And when the Romans are making things difficult, you can play one off against the other. In terms of Jewish Samaritan relations, one of King Herod the Great. Herod the Great's the one who kills the babies. In Matthew, one of his wives is a Samaritan, her name is Malthus, and she's actually the mother of Herod Antipas, the fellow who kills John the Baptist and his brother Herod Philip. So on the one hand you have enmity, on the other hand you have intermarriage. I think John is familiar with the Synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke. So in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says in the mission discourse, this is Matthew chapter 10. Don't go to the Samaritans, don't go to the Gentiles, just go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And he never abrogates that. So whereas the great commission is go make disciples of all the Gentiles, he never mentions the Samaritans again. Mark never mentions the Samaritans at all. So you might get the impression that Jesus. And there's no Samaritan mission in Luke, cause that's reserved for the Book of Acts, for Acts 8. So you might get the impression that Jesus didn't want the disciples to go to the Samaritans. What happens In John chapter 4, Jesus does it on his own because the guys are out buying lunch. And what frequently happens in the Gospel of John is John sets us up at the beginning to think one thing, and then it turns out to be totally wrong. So we get this comment right at the beginning and we're not sure because the ancient Greek texts don't have punctuation. Jesus says, give me two drinks. It's very abrupt. Give me two drinks. And she extends the conversation. How is it that you, a Jew, are asking, a drink of water from me, a Samaritan? And the next line says, basically because Jews and Samaritans don't have anything in common. And I'm not sure if that's her speaking or whether that's John the narrator coming in, but these guys have gone out to buy lunch. They are in Samaria, which means they have to have something in common. So at the beginning, you think you know everything. And by the time you get to the end, you know nothing. And then you have to go back and regroup. Which is in part of what makes John such a brilliant gospel, is you have to read it several times to try to figure out, where have I miscued? And I think that John. John puts that in there for the sake of the reader. Oh, for. For. For this professor at Princeton. Don't bore me. What I would tell my students is the first question you need to ask is, how do you know that? Because we just make up stuff all the time. Or we. We say what our teachers told us and, you know, we never bothered to ask them, how do you know that? And the second question is, why do I care? Which is another way of saying, please don't bore me. You've just discovered something. What difference does it make to me? Show me. And what difference does it make to you? You've just parsed a verb in a new way. Good for you. I'm delighted, but I don't care. Show me why it matters. So I think that's right in terms of the marriage stuff. Some people will say that the woman was caught in what's called a Leverett situation. And both Jews and Samaritans, because we have the Torah, have this situation called levirate marriage. Levir is Latin for brother in law. And the idea is that if so, let's say I'm married and my husband dies and I don't have a son. Under levirate marriage, I marry my husband's brother. This would be Uncle Gary. I marry my husband's brother and Uncle Gary and I conceive a child, and that child inherits my dead husband's name in the state. Whether this was actually being practiced or not in the first century is very, very hard to determine, because there's a system by which you can get out of it. It's called halitsa. And we even see that system in the Book of Ruth, which plays out a form of levirate marriage where there's a fellow who's closer to Ruth's husband in relationship than Boaz, the guy she eventually marries. So he goes through this chalice ceremony. So as if John might be taking this idea of levirate marriage. And she's been married to these five brothers they've all died from. She's still somehow contracted to that family. The patriarch, part patriarch of that family, does not want to give his youngest son to this woman because she's clearly bad luck, right? Five husbands poison mushrooms. So she's now shacking up with somebody else. But the fact is, we don't know that the person with whom she's living, who may not be her husband, might be the father and she's taking care of him. I mean, we don't know and we don't know if she's in any sexual relationship. So John may be playing off of this motif. And that would not surprise me because there are a number of motifs that show up in parables and in sayings in the synoptic gospels, which in John tend to be narratives. We have a parable in the Gospel of Luke where there's a fellow identified as the rich man and he winds up in hell and is uncomfortable. And Lazarus, the poor man, lay at his gates and he's covered with sores and things are awful. And when he dies, he winds up in the bosom of Abraham, which is like the heavenly high rent district. And at the end of this parable, Lazarus, who's the rich man who's in hell, says to Abraham, father Abraham, can you send Lazarus to tell my brothers to warn them? And Abraham basically says, even if somebody comes back from the dead, they're not going to get it. So what do I have in the Gospel of John? I have a fellow named Lazarus who comes back from the dead in John chapter 11. And because of that, that's where the split comes about. And that's when the plot to kill Jesus really, really hits into high gear. So I'm wondering if John is using some of those stories in Luke to help develop some of the narratives in John. Similarly, in Matthew, Mark and Luke, the Sadducees, who don't care about resurrection at all. So sad. They're a Jewish group, they only accept the Pentateuch, much like Samaritans, by the way. Side note, Rabbinic Judaism sometimes confuses Sadducees and Samaritans. So do students on exams, by the way. But the rabbis confused because they both just take the Pentateuch, right? So when Jesus is being interrogated, I mean, mark chapter 12 here, it's the easiest place to go. And people are asking him difficult questions like should we pay taxes to Caesar? And questions that politicians are told not to answer directly. And Jesus, good politician, never answers a question directly. I appreciate that. The Sadducees who don't believe in resurrection say, there's this woman who's been married to five husbands in the Resurrection, whose wife is she? They don't care about the answer. They don't believe in resurrection. They're just trying to trip up Jesus. And he said, basically, you're asking the wrong Question. God's not the God of the dead. God is the God of the living. And the story about this woman who's been married to five guys looks to me kind of like that. Question. She's been married five times. What's the issue? And the thing with this woman is she's not a fallen woman. She's just had. Maybe the brothers were hemophiliacs. I mean, who knows? These husbands died. That's. That's sad. Or even if she were divorced, that's sad, too, for whatever reason. But I don't want to turn her into a fallen woman. And I also don't want to turn her into a victim. I want to see her as having agency. [00:33:49] Speaker A: Yeah. Which I think we do when we read it, as you say, she. She gives as good as she gets. [00:33:54] Speaker B: Absolutely. [00:33:55] Speaker A: In that, my parents say also, by [00:33:56] Speaker B: the way, the successful evangelist. [00:33:58] Speaker A: Right, Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. No, absolutely. I want to stay on this marriage for a minute, but pivot, because this, for me, as a theologian, I keep thinking about this. The way that you, the way that you framed it helped me. And this is. I think it's in your chapter on family values, and you talk about Jesus perspective on divorce that Jesus is teaching. And, and I think that we get this with Paul sometimes, but I don't think we necessarily get it with Jesus as much that he's preaching and teaching in these. In this context, from an eschatological perspective, like, the world is ending. The world as we know it is ending. And so Jesus is talking about from that eschatological perspective, which I think, yeah, I can see this with Paul. And we kind of get taught this with Paul a little bit more than we do with Jesus. And so I think, help us understand Jesus context in this sit in this setting when he's. When he's talking about divorce and when he's being asked about marriage and divorce. And when he answers, yeah, so I [00:35:14] Speaker B: mean, let's just start with Paul to clear up the Paul thing. In First Corinthians, Paul's talking about marriage. And he basically says, I wish all were. I am, which means celibate, but it's better to marry than to be aflame with passion, which is not a super strong endorsement of the marital bond. Right. So if you. If you can't manage your. Your libido, then by all means get married. But in light of the impending difficulties, which is the return of Jesus, you know, and this is also to people who are enslaved, remain in the state in which you're called, because if you get married, you get other things to worry about, you know, like China, patents and in laws. So, I mean, you don't need to deal with that. And I think Jesus is taking that same route. Oh, by. And Paul, by the time you get up to the pastoral epistles, it's, you know, get married and make babies. I think Jesus is not terribly interested in what we would call pair bonding, where you have two people who pair off. Because once you pair off as a married couple, then your loyalty tends to be more toward that person with whom you pair bonded than to everybody else. Like, you all are fine, but my partner, he's the one I'm going to go home with tonight. [00:36:13] Speaker A: That's right. [00:36:14] Speaker B: And because he's setting up this alternative family, what anthropologists would call fictive kinship systems. Who are my mother and brother and sisters, those who hear the will of God and do it. It's not who were the husbands and wives. And he pulls families apart generation to generation. Like, I like the scene where he calls James and John from the boat and old man Zebedee's in the boat with the hired guys going, What? You know, Mrs. Zebedee eventually joins in. According to Matthew. I think old man Zebedee is up there going, what? Unless you hate father and mother. Luke adds wife. Matthew doesn't, you know, children and estates, you can't have any part of me. We know Peter's married because Jesus heals his mother in law. And Paul in First Corinthians 9 talks about Peter being accompanied by his sister wife. But we never see Mrs. Peter in the Gospels. So I think what Jesus has is not only an eschatological group expecting the end of the world as we know it, what Tom Wright would call the end of the space time continuum. But I think he's also celibate. He's called frequently across the gospel spectrum a bridegroom. But he's never a husband. I mean, unless you go to Ephesians where he's married to the church, which isn't quite the same thing, or where he's a dead lamb who's married to Jerusalem in Revelation, but he's never actually a husband. There's no pair bonding. Nor do I want to make Mary Magdalene Mrs. Jesus because I think she's important on her own. Right? Not just because she married well. I think, by the way, the reason John has the story of the wedding at Cana is to assure people, oh, no, weddings are fine. Weddings are fine. You might have heard that thing about we'll all be like angels who are neither married nor given in marriage, but weddings are fine. It's all good, right? When it comes to divorce, Jews in the first century debated under what circumstances could you get divorce? With some people, primarily Sadducees, but more, some of the more conservative end of the Pharisees saying you can only get divorced in cases of adultery. Which by the way means they're not stoning people for adultery. Because if they're stoning people for adultery, you can skip the divorce and go right to the stoning. Right. They're not stoning people for adultery. And others are saying pretty much for any reason, it's no fault. There's a rabbinic tract called Gitin a get is a divorce in Hebrew. So this is post Jesus, but we're within about a hundred years and we don't know how far back this goes where you actually have debates between the house of Hillel and the house of Shammai to eventually rabbinic houses. And Hillel says, basically, you know, the house of Hillel, she burns your dinner, you find somebody. It's really quite no fault. And the house of Shammai says only in cases of adultery, to which, by the way, you need two witnesses and you have to warn the people ahead of time. So at that point, if you get caught, it's really on you. You were just sloppy. But Jewish women at the time were protected by something called a ketubah, a marriage contract. We have, we actually have copies of these going back to the fifth century bce, the four hundreds, from Elephantini in Egypt. Jewish, Jewish women have these to this day. I have one hanging on my bedroom wall. And what the ketubah does is give the wife financial support in cases of divorce. And if you write your ketuba well, you can make divorce financially prohibited. Moreover, first century Jews were polygynous. You could have more than one wife. So King Herod the great actually had 10, a couple of whom he killed, by the way. But he did have 10. So were Jewish men getting and women getting divorced willy nilly? No. Could Jewish men divorce their wives for the flimsiest of reasons? No, because they've got these marriage contracts. Moreover, the rabbis are engaging in hypothetical material. They're telling you what they think people could do rather than describing what people are doing. So they're prescriptive rather than descriptive, to use the technical language. When Christian ministers say, oh, he's protecting the wives of women by, by forbidding divorce? Absolutely not. If you're married to somebody who is violent, murderous, that's not protecting you. If you're married to somebody who has become mentally disabled and that person needs 24 hour care. Maybe you need something for you too. And that's something to consider. That's a moral question. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus says, by the way, husbands shall not divorce their wives and wives shall not divorce their husbands. And nobody's saying, oh, he's protecting the husbands from having to go out into the street and beg. Return to prostitution. Josephus, our first century historian, says Jewish women aren't supposed to get divorced. And then he proceeds to list a number of them who did, including by the way, Herodias, the wife of Herod Antipas, who divorced her husband in order to marry Herod Antipas. So I don't think he's protecting women's rights at all. What he's doing is in fact saying if you get divorced, the thing he really doesn't like is remarriage after divorce because he's not real thrilled about this pair bonding thing. But at the same time he is separating spouses. To say that your loyalty is not just to one person, your loyalty is to this broader family of God in which marriage is no longer important. Being like the angels in heaven who neither marry nor are given in marriage, that's most important. [00:41:21] Speaker A: The fictive kinship that was, that was new to me. But that lens made it make sense. [00:41:29] Speaker B: Right. And then that's what the therapeutic are doing. These, this ideal community Philo talks about, they look kind of like Jewish Shakers. They're men and women living celibately in adjoining dormitories who come together for communal meals, prayer and antiphonal singing. Great. It's likely that some of the people who compose the Dead Sea Scrolls who also by the way, use the, the Genesis passage about this is why a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife. The same passage for Jesus when they talk about divorce. So that stuff is already in the air. Under what circumstances should you get divorced? [00:42:05] Speaker A: Let's, let's talk about the woman with the issue of blood and her partner kind of literary partner, the little girl, the little girl who gets raised. Was this in your healthcare chapter? I'm trying to remember. I didn't put a note. This was another one of those places. And I will say I'm going to ask you to preach to us today because we, we talked pre record about Christianities and I think it's important to name that there are lots of traditions of, of Christianity. But some of the same stuff comes up when we, when we're making first century Judaism look bad in order to make Jesus look good. One of the places that you name in this part is, is illness, connection to sin. And, and there are still lots of traditions in Christianity where that is a thing. Someone is sick because someone has done something wrong. [00:43:02] Speaker B: Right? [00:43:02] Speaker A: They have. They have done something and they're being punished essentially by God. And so I like how you debunk that for the first century. And I'm just gonna say, just like a side note, I think we can use that debunk today in, in, in our current context. But yeah, the woman with the issue of blood and the. And the little girl who's raised also. [00:43:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's real. Thank you. I think it's really helpful to debunk because otherwise what we wind up doing is blaming victims. And that tends not to be helpful. So where does this come from? In part, it comes from the beginning of John chapter 9, when Jesus and the guys encounter a fellow who's congenitally blind. And the disciples say, who sinned? This man or his parents that he was born blind. So the idea is kind of floating around at the time. It's also a weird question, by the way, how could he have sinned if he is born blind? In are they thinking about reincarnation or karma? Because ideas like that were floating around there too. It's not like Judaism had. Had quite settled down. There are Judaisms various ways of understanding the tradition. And Jesus says, no, this is done so I can reveal my glory. Which is not a great answer, by the way, but it's. [00:44:10] Speaker A: I agree, it is not a great answer. [00:44:12] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm not thrilled with it. However, my friends who, who have experienced illness and then suddenly there's a drug. Right. Or suddenly there's an operation. Generally what they say at the end is, you know what? All I'm thinking about is how I feel better now. And I'm not thinking about the past 20 years or the past 40 years when I was suffering. I'm just so thankful for the good stuff. So I, who have not experienced that read the beginning of John 9. In one way, they who have experienced it quite differently. And that's in part why it's helpful to talk to everybody. Thank God this came about rather than, well, why did I have to suffer for 40 years? Yeah, for the most part, we don't find Jews coupling sin and illness on occasion. You get it? I think we get it actually, with that. That fetchy, can I use the word, catchy. It's a good term for sure. Yiddish term for complaining. This Confection guy in John 5, the guy by the pool, you know, I've been here for 38 years. Nobody's taking me down. Everybody gets there ahead of me. I was like. And I picture him like, with a little chalk marking off the number of years on the wall. It's really quite annoying. And Jesus says to him at the end, don't sin again, like, hello. But for the most part, it's decoupled. So if we look at blindness, for example, because we've got this issue of the fellow who's been congenitally blind, Esau's functionally blind, which is how Jacob manages to pass himself off as his brother. Jacob is functionally blind. Toward the end of his life, Eli apparently has some sort of heart condition, so that when he hears the ark has been taken, he falls off his chair. Jonathan's son Mephibosheth can't walk. That's because of a childhood accident. It's not because of sin. Job is clearly a physical mess. And Job didn't do anything wrong. And we have stories of rabbis who are blind, who cannot walk, whatever. And their disciples take care of them, because in the rabbinic tradition, which means visiting the sick, that's a mitzvah. It's like a good deed, but it's a commandment. And if Jews thought that people who were ailing were all sinful, then there's no reason to take care of them, right? So we have to do that decoupling. Moreover, in the first century, a number of people, in fact today a number of people, thought that sickness was caused by demons, which is why Jesus, even going back to Peter's mother in law, can rebuke the fever, which sounds like bad fever, but it's as if the fever is a demon that needs to leave her or people who are acting aberrantly. And the diagnosis for the first century, this must be some form of demonic possession. It doesn't make you sinful, it makes you a victim, but it also makes you someone who needs to be cared for, which is why the. The syrophoenician woman who you mentioned, or the fellow with the demon possessed son who keeps throwing himself into the fire. Self injury or advocating for their kids? They wouldn't be advocating for their kids if they thought their kids were sinful. So we have to do that decoupling. As far as the woman with the issue of. I like that expression issue, because it really is an issue. I had, by the way, for a number of years, cultured the hemorrhaging lady, and then I was in Australia in May, and a woman came up to me after I'd given this presentation. She said, I actually had a vaginal hemorrhage. If this woman has been hemorrhaging for 12 years, she'd be dead for 11 and a half of them. Right? It's the wrong word. So the woman with uterine bleeding or the woman with vaginal bleeds, much better. Or the issue of blood, much better Depression description. So Christian commentators come in and say, because she's got a regular bleeding in. In Hebrew, she would be a zava woman bleeding outside of her normal menstrual cycle. She is ritually unclean. This is true. She'd also be unclean if she were menstruating. Normal menstruation. She'd also be unclean if she just had a baby. But after Mary gives birth to Jesus or Elizabeth gives birth to John the Baptist, they are ritually unclean for 40 days, and they're not sitting around going, ah, damn, I'm ritually unclean. Right. This is not an issue. As it were. And by the way, men are ritually unclean after ejaculation. That may be the first time that's word's been used on your podcast. And, you know, the next morning, if they go down to the ritual bath to regain a status of purity again and other guys see him, they're not going to say, oh, you poor guy, you ejaculated last night. They're going to go, good on you. So what typically happens is Christians misread issues of ritual purity and they read, Jesus is doing away with purity. Concerns to the contrary, he doesn't do away with purity at all. He restores people to states of ritual purity. The little girl who's paired up with the woman, the woman's been bleeding for 12 years. The little girl is 12 years old. There's all sorts of connections. The woman, because of this bleeding, is probably unlikely to be able to carry a child to term. And the little girl is just on. On the age of menarche, just on the age of when her menstruation is going to begin. So one woman can't, and the other one's not ready to. So there are all sorts of connections. The little girl is embedded in a family system with father and mother. The bleeding lady may be. I mean, there may be a husband back home taking care of the other kids. We don't know, but she is by herself. What Jesus does in both cases is restore people to states of ritual purity. If you are a corpse, you are impure. Okay. You don't care because you're dead. But people around you would be in states of ritual impurity. Right. So you get people into the ground. So you go in a funeral procession and so on. And the woman is ritually impure, so he stops her bleeding and he raises the child from the dead. So they go from disabled to abled, and they go from death to life, and they go from impurity back to purity. He's restoring people to states of ritual purity, which means he followed various of the purity laws. He didn't follow all of them, but Jews debated. Which ones do you follow and which ones do you not? [00:49:55] Speaker A: This was another place where, if we make a connection to how do we think about these kinds of things today? The woman who'd been bleeding for 12 years, the text tells us that she was broke now. [00:50:08] Speaker B: Yeah. She spent all her money on physicians and nothing worked. Tells you something about a broken health care system. Now what do we do if the health care system causes you to go bankrupt? There's clearly something wrong. And the gospel sitting there telling us that, hello. [00:50:23] Speaker A: Right. And Jesus cares enough to step in. [00:50:26] Speaker B: Absolutely. [00:50:27] Speaker A: In that moment. And. Well, I guess that. I guess we could. We could see that. Does he or doesn't he? He makes himself available, I guess, in. In some ways. But the gospel writer tells us that this was a good thing, that her health was restored to her. It was a bad thing that she had gone broke trying to take care of it on herself with. By herself. [00:50:50] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, but you don't need the gospel to tell you that. That should be kind of obvious. Right? [00:50:54] Speaker A: Should be kind of obvious. It should be kind of obvious. [00:50:57] Speaker B: But. But also for this lady. I really like this lady. And the problem is we don't have a name for her, so we can't. Like, you can't name your daughter after her because you don't want to name your daughter Bleeding lady, because that's, you know, Bleeding Lady Smith really doesn't work very well. But the courage that she shows because Jesus is so powerful and she knows he's powerful, which is why she's going after him to begin with. If a person that powerful can bring. Bring the dead to life or cure blindness or as he will do later, just zap a fig tree and it's done. He can zap you as well as he can heal you. And Jesus, there's a connection here, I think, between Jesus and the Ark of the Covenant. And there's this really good story in First Samuel where the ark is being brought out and it gets unsteady. And there's this fellow who reaches out to study the ark, and he's zapped dead. And Jesus is kind of like that. And you get a sense of that in Mark's story. So Mark's stories tend to be a little bit longer than those in Matthew and Luke, where Mark says Jesus felt power coming out of him. Like, it's like a battery discharging. I mean, he's so powerful that he can't even control it. And that's the courage on her part. [00:52:07] Speaker A: Yes. [00:52:07] Speaker B: And she may be thinking, I've been bleeding for 12 years. I'm totally broke. I got nothing left to lose. But. But she takes the moment and she shows her agency. And I think that's brilliant. And when Jesus says, who touched me? The disciples, who, of course, fairly clueless and marked. How do you know who touched? Is a huge crowd around you. He knows, and he allows her to give testimony. [00:52:28] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:52:28] Speaker B: This is what happened. And she's not only acknowledging what he did, she's acknowledging her own agency at the time. I think that's brilliant. [00:52:36] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. One more. Choose your own adventure. As we close out, often when I have professors on the podcast, which I love to do, I envision myself in class, and there are some, not all, but some who are kind of going, ooh, if, if. If they would just ask this, I could really kind of get, you know, to where I wanted to go. You can almost see it. I can't see that in you, but I will give you the opportunity to say what there's. Choose your adventure choice. A. What question did I not ask? Ask it and answer it. You know, where did you want to go that I didn't take us today. The other choice is we can. We can end by talking about the Sarophoenician woman, which was one of one of the three women that I mentioned at the beginning saying, maybe we'll get there, maybe we won't. And we talked about the other two, but not her. [00:53:29] Speaker B: But, yeah, I. I would like to talk about the Syrophoenician woman or in. In Mark 7 or the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15. I find the ideas. What questions would I want you to ask? I find that weird because I don't know what you're interested in, and I don't want to judge what you might be interested in. So I'd much rather that you or anybody listening to this podcast would say, Gee, A.J. can you talk more about this or look at the book? And if you have additional questions, Say, write to me or send me an email saying, what about this and what about that? So let's just talk about what you were interested in because that's in part what professors should be able to do. Part of our job is to convey the necessary information that we think you ought to have in order for you to be competent in your field. But I think part of the academic job is to be responsive to the questions that our students have and not just say what we want to say. So thank you for asking your question. Mark. Chapter seven has a woman, a Greek Osirophoenician by birth, which is a very hoity toity way of identifying her. So she's like, you know, a WASP from way back who came over on the Mayflower. It's a kind of upper classy thing. We do have some evidence of people in Tyrone Sidon, this would be Lebanon, siphoning off resources from Upper Galley. Like they're the wealthy people, they're the Hellenized. And Upper galley was sort of a breadbasket, but they're. They're losing some of their resources. Jesus is having downtime in Mark. He's in a house, maybe a Jewish house. There were Jews living in Tyre inside. Doesn't want anybody know he's there. And she just kind of barges in. It's like, hey, my daughter's possessed by a demon. Go do something. Which sounds very much to me like a woman of privilege. [00:55:01] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. [00:55:02] Speaker B: And he just wants some downtime and he didn't want to deal with her. So in, in Mark, in Mark's version, which is strangely shorter than the one in Matthew, and she doesn't show up in Luke or John, you know, Jesus says, look, it's let the children first be fed because it's not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dog. So in other words, it's not your time yet, Right? I'll get there eventually. But let the children, this would be the Jews, let them first be fed. And eventually we'll get around to you. All Gentiles. And the woman who's like super smart says, look, even the puppies under the tables eat the crumbs that the children drops. Oh, and let the children first be. It's not right to take the children's bread, throw it to the dogs. So yeah, he calls her a dog. Matthew uses the term kunari, which means household puppies. But to call a woman a little bitch is not any better than to call her a. I mean, this is diminutive insult. And instead of Fighting back. Or instead of saying, you schmuck, or instead of just walking out, she says, look, you know, even the dogs under the tables get the crumbs. You want to call me a dog? Fine, call me a dog. But I'm still entitled. Jesus is blown away by this and says, because of your word. Like you responded appropriately, let this be done for you. And she goes back home and she finds her daughter healthy, fabulous. Now what Matthew does is extend this conversation. And the Matthew was more difficult because, Matthew, she's not a Greek, a Syrophoenician by birth, she's a Canaanite. The Canaanites aren't supposed to be there, right? If we read Joshua, we'd think they'd all gotten wiped out. Except if you read Judges, it was clear that they hadn't, right? Plus there's Rahab. Now Matthew, who is a very good writer. As soon as Matthew in Matthew 15 identifies this woman as a Canaanite, I know she's going to get what she wants. How do I know that? Because Matthew has a genealogy with at least two Canaanite women there. And the two Canaanite women in the Gospel of Matthew in the genealogy get what they want over above men with whom they're paired who don't, you know, and they have to get with the program. So the first who's actually the first woman mentioned in, in the New Testament is Tamar, who may or may not be a canine. She looks like a Canaanite to me. And she's caught in one of these levered marriage situations that we were talking about before with the Sadducees question. She eventually winds up, through some really interesting machinations, having sex with her father in law, who then doesn't recognize her and thinks she's guilty of adultery. The Old Testament has some really good stuff in it. And you know, this is. Why did they let that in the public school system. It's very odd. And when she's being brought out to be burned alive for committing adultery by Judah, you know, she says, listen, I'm pregnant by the guy who owns these and shows his signet and his staff. This is what the biblical scholar Robert Alter called his driver's license and his major credit cards. And Judah says she is more righteous than I because I withheld my younger son says that Matthew's righteousness language is really huge. And the second woman we get is Rahab, who's the prostitute from Jericho. And she does what the men with whom she's paired in the Book of Joshua, chapter two do not she's the faithful one. What do the guys do when they get into the land of Israel? The first place they go is a brothel. You don't go to a brothel to check on munitions. Right, so you're laughing. This is the Bible. It's actually a really funny test. So I already know she's going to get what she wants. Jesus is not in a house. In fact, it's not clear that he actually goes into Tyre and Sidon. It's the text says, she comes out to meet him, so they may be on this kind of borderland. And she says, you know, help me. My daughter is possessed by an unclean spirit, severely possessed by a demon. He doesn't even speak to her. He ignores her, which is not great. The disciples who were there, they're not in Mark, they're in Matthew. And they said, the Greek is up a looser. If you're Catholic, it's intercessory prayer. If you're Protestant, it means, send her away. I'm a Jew, I don't have a horse in that race. But I think they're actually saying, do something for her. Because Matthew upgrades the disciples, they're not quite as clueless as they are in Mark. Jesus says, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Which repeats what he said back in the mission discourse when he said, don't go to the Gentiles, don't go to the Samaritans, just go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. There's no first or last here. It's just like, you're not at my table, lady. She kneels down in front of him, which I think is holding her ground, right? Because if you kneel in front of somebody, you either have to walk around that person or you have to try to step over. And she's holding her ground. And it's like a wrestling movie. Get low to the ground. Lord, help me. Which is like a lament, Son, help me. It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs. None of this. First, last, nothing. And the woman responds. Even the. The dogs under the table get to eat what their masters drop. What she is doing here, and Matthew has already set me up, is she's following the Sermon on the Mount. Somebody strikes you on the right cheek, somebody insults you, somebody dismisses you. Don't punch back and don't cower away and leave. Literally hold your ground and say something that might continue that relationship until she. You can get what she wants. So she's following that model of the Sermon on the Mount, not responding to violence with more violence, but standing your ground and saying, I am entitled and you need to listen to me. And what she's also doing is modeling the literary conventions is sometimes called the convention of the meek King. I got that language from a biblical scholar named Deirdre Good. And the meek king is somebody who's in a position of authority, who cedes his authority for the sake of somebody who is lower down on the social roles. And there are stories about Caesar Augustus and the Emperor Hadrian and Rabbi Judah, the prince, who are asked for favors for people like an old broken down soldier, a widow lady, a poor man. And initially they don't want to do anything, but then because of a clever word, they wind up doing what they're supposed to do. So what Jesus does here is model for the disciples. Even if these people are to use the restaurant language, not at your table, you can still give them a glass of water, you can still serve them. And it's also, I think, a really good lesson to people who feel disempowered. You've got a voice, you've got power. You can stand your ground if you need something from somebody who's unwilling to give it to you. But whether it's red tape at a hospital or getting through the tenure system at a university, whatever it is, getting to talk to the pastor who's just too busy, you keep knocking, you hold your ground. And it's possible under those circumstances that because of your word in Mark or because of your faith in Matthew, you'll get what you want. We don't have to turn Judaism into a xenophobic, misogynistic morass. We just have to understand where Jesus is at the time, who these characters are, how they function in the Gospels, what those words mean in the broader Bible context, and how they fit ancient literary conventions. It's a lot. But if one really wants to dig into the New Testament, just do more than a surface reading. Do the history, do the imagination, do the. What ethics do we get from this? [01:01:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you so much, A.J. wow. Yeah, this is gonna. This is gonna stick with me. And I'm gonna be playing with these things in my mind today. Again, this newest book is Jesus for Everyone, Not Just Christians, by Amy Jill Levine. As a book bonus, I'm going to link one of my favorite videos of yours, Life After Death, Jesus, Judaism and Justice from Theo Ed. I actually used that in one of my papers a while back, and I thought it was just really delightful that's great. [01:02:32] Speaker B: I should tell you I have never seen it. Once I do a video, there's absolutely nothing I can do about it and I don't want to watch because I will next day quarterback and I don't want to have that horrible feeling. So I will proofread a book. That's fine. But if it's a tape, there's nothing I can do with it. I have never seen it. Well, I thought it was okay. [01:02:55] Speaker A: I thought it was a great one. I thought it was a great one. I've watched it more than once like I said, and used it in one of my papers and just thought it was. It was incredible. And a lot of food for thought for Christians as well. So thank you so much for this. This has been a delight. [01:03:09] Speaker B: Pleasure to talk with you. I hope to do it again sometimes. [01:03:13] Speaker A: The links for all the resources mentioned in today's episode can be found in the show Notes, music and podcast production by Seth Buscetti. Be sure to give us a review on itunes and subscribe at your favorite podcast listening app. You can also Visit us at thatmakestotalsense. [01:03:38] Speaker B: It.